"Agencies often suffer when trying to tell the story of what makes them different or better; this is brave, fun and a challenge to their own people. Let's see how many other places can throwdown like this." —juror Glen Sheehan
"A fun stunt to get some buzz going." —juror Mathew Ranauro
Overview: This is an online documentary of a day-long event titled "Think." More than just a film, the site explores everything that happened that day, recreating the events as they unfolded. There are hundreds of ad agencies in Canada, and every day they tout themselves as unconventional. But it's not often that agencies practice what they preach. Think consisted of eight interdisciplinary thinkers from Zulu Alpha Kilo crammed into a box in Toronto's Dundas Square where they solicited creative challenges from passersby and solved then on the spot while "thinking inside the box." The Web site is an online extension of the live event.
• The event was seen by over 117,000 in Dundas Square and people waited over two hours to participate.
• The biggest creative challenge for the Web site was editing down a full day of captured content and distilling it into bite-sized chunks while still giving a full picture of the entire event.
• In total there are more than 50 images and 30 videos on the site.
Comments by Zulu Alpha Kilo:
Were there any specific demands that made the project easier or harder? "The actual day of the project was the first official cold day of the year in Toronto. It was as if we jumped from the end of summer directly into the dead of winter. There we were, a bunch of creative thinkers in a plywood box plunking away with cold fingers on cold keyboards challenging ourselves to come up with creative ideas on the spot. Two of our biggest challenges were making sure we had all of the technical requirements of a creative agency (fast Internet, printing, etc.) in a remote plywood box in the middle of a city square, and feeding live animations to all of the video billboards surrounding the square to drive awareness to the pedestrian traffic."
Did you learn anything new during the process? "Bring gloves the next time we plan to spend twelve hours in an unheated box in a windy city square."
How did time constraints affect your final solution? "While the actual event required coming up with creative solutions on the spot we felt that the site should have a different degree of polish: We took the time to communicate clearly with a simple navigation."
What would you do differently if you could start the project over? "We wouldn't change a thing. It was exciting and rewarding in ways that we hadn't imagined when we started the project."
